Escape From Evil - Ernest Becker.pdf

February 14, 2017 | Author: Cristian Dan | Category: N/A
Share Embed Donate


Short Description

Download Escape From Evil - Ernest Becker.pdf...

Description

''PROFOUND'' ''

"CHALLENGING"

HA UNTING ' '

"A profound, nourishing book which is absolutrly essential to the understanding of our troubled times. Ernest Becker has plumbed the darkest aspects of our experience and given us the insight we most desperately need."' -Ana·is Nin

"(A] challenging book- a guide into the shadowy labyrinths of Everyman's psyche." -The Grand Rapids Press "An urgent essay that bears all the marks of a final philosophical raging against the dyin g of the light .... The beauty - and terror- of his final testament lies in his unsparing analysis of how men from time immemorial

have sought scapegoats and victims in order to bolster their intimations of immortality -Newsweek

"A masterful study of man's struggle to transcend death through culture, and the evil which ensues .... an invaluable and haunting insight into the root of man's evil."

-The Sunday Oklahoman "This brilliant and challenging book, written as Becker lay dying, adds another bit of reason to balance destruction .... it is a work of felicity and the kind of erudition that makes Becker much more than the label of cultural anthropologist suggests .... It is, in the best sense of the words. both scientific and philosophical .... His contribution to the continuing dialogue is of the highest importance." -Roben Kirsch, The Los Angeles Times

"This is one of those few books which will affect all your subsequent reading, and help shape your self-awareness." -The Providence Sunday Journal " S huttl in g constantly among the individual, the culture and the cosmos. [Becker's] book is a synthesis of anthropology, Freud, Otto Rank. Norman 0. Brown, and his own considerable fund of observation and for­

mulation .

.

.

"

-Anatole Broyard, The New York Times

"BRILLIANT" ''EXTRAORDINARY'' ''EXHILARATING'' "Becker has carried forward his brilliant synthesis of post-Freudian •

thought . .. . Writing with remarkable simplicity and insight .. . has a haunting coherence and a built-in challenge to the serious reader seeking a solution to man's irrational destructiveness.". -Publishers Weekly ·'This extraordinary and wide-ranging book . .

should stimulate the

search for philosophical and psychological systems that are more realistic about the human condition." -Margaret Manning. The Boston Sunday Globe .. A brilliant generalist with a neo-Freudian perspective, Becker surveys anthropology, existential philosophy and psychoanalysis for the foundations of a science of society

. His work will be a great help to the many

generalists now working on a post-Freudian, post-Marxian synthesis." -The Detroit Free Press

"An exploration of the natural history of evil

.

.

.

insights into the human condition, fashioning them into

.

a

gather! s I the best general theory of

man .... Becker began as a cultural anthropologist, but he ended as a formidable polymath

.

Escape From Evil is a profound final

testament . . . . an appropriate culmination of his career

-The Chronicle of Higher Education Review "The author's presence- high on ideas, bold and disorderly, out­ rageous and appreciative, always in search - has an exhilarating effect

.

.

.

.

Becker's tone is . . urgent and animated - he is still there

arguing, doubting, debating with himself, despairing, looking for and rarely finding avenues of human hope. Again he displays his extraordinary synthetic gift as he moves freely, even dazzlingly, not only from Freud to Marx and from Rank to Brown, but from Rousseau to Hobbes, Huizinga, Mumford. Hugh Duncan and Kenneth Burke .... Becker's work should give powerful impetus to the development of a depth psychology appro­ priate to our condition and our history, but with significance beyond the historical moment .... Any future social theory will owe much to Becker, as does contemporary psychological thought .... The power of the work prevails." -Robert Jay Lifton, The New York Times Book Review

ESCAPE FROM EVIL Ernest Becker

THE FREE PRESS A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. NEW YORK

Collier Macmillan Publishers WNDON

Copyright

©

1975

by Marie Becker

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or trans­

mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanic;al, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher. The

F ree Press

A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 866 Thi rd Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022

Collier M acmillan Canada, Ltd. First Free Pre s s

Paperback Edition 1976

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-12059 Printed

in the United States of America

printing number 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

The poem on page xi is from "The Ninth Elegy," in Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, translated by C.F. Macintyre ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: U niversity of California Press, 1 963, pp. 67 and 69 ) , originally published by the University of California Press; reprinted by permission of The Regents of the University of California.

In memory of Otto Rank, whose thought may well prove to be the rarest gift of Freud's disciples to the world.

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. William James1

If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst. Thomas H ardy

Why, if it's possible to spend this span of existence as laurel, a little darker than all other greens, with little waves on every leaf-edge ( like the smile of a breeze ) , why, then , must we be human and, shunning destiny, long for it? . Oh , not because happiness, that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists. Not from curiosity, or to practise the heart, that would also be in the laurel . . . but because to be here is much , and the transient Here seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most transient. Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more. And we also once. Never again. But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable. .

.

And so we drive ourselves and want to achieve it, w ant to hold it in our simple hands, in the surfeited gaze and in the speechless heart. Want to become it. Give it to whom? Rather keep all forever . . . bu t to the other realm, alas, what can be taken? Not the power of seeing, learned here so slowly, and nothing that's happened here. Nothing. Rainer Maria Rilke

Contents

Prefatory Note

XV

xvii

Preface Introduction. The Human Condition: Between Appetite

1

and Ingenuity

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The Primitive World: Ritual

as

Practical Technics

6

The Primitive World: Economics as Expiation and Power

26

The Origin of Inequality

38

The Evolution of Inequality

52

The New Historical Forms of Immortality Power

63

Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology

73

The Basic Dynamic of Human Evil

91 96

The Nature of Social Evil Social Theory: The Merger of Marx and Freud

128

Retrospect and Conclusion: What Is the Heroic Society?

146

References

171

Index

183

xiii

Prefatory Note

Approaching death, Ernest Becker requested that the original manu­ script of this, his final book, rest private and unpublished in a desk drawer, no energy remaining in him for any further barter with the gods. Believing the work to be an eloquent closure of his sci­ entific literary career, Robert Wallace and I (with some initial anguish over the risk of irreverence ) firmly decided upon publica­ tion realizing that had the time remained, the author himself would have done so for what he considered to be his magnum opus. Some material has been eliminated as it appears elsewhere, but beyond editing and routine work the book is Ernest's. Marie Becker

XV

Preface

This book is a companion volume to The Denial of Death. It completes the task begun there, which is to synthesize the scien­ tific and tragic perspectives on man. In The Denial of Death I ar­ gued that man's innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. In this book I attempt to show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil. This book also com­ pletes my confrontation of the work of Otto Rank and my attempt to transcribe its relevance for a general science of man. Ideally, of course, the two books should be read side by side in order to give the integrated and comprehensive picture that the author himself has (or imagines he has); but each book stands on its own and can be read without the other. In my previous writings I tried to sketch out what might be a synthesis of the science of man. One of their major shortcomings, I now see, had to do with their fundam ental organizing concept. I thought it was enough to use the unifying "principle of self-esteem maintenance." But as we will see in Chapter Five, it was too ab­ stract, it lacked body, a universal, energetic content in the form of specific, inflexible motives. These motives I found in the work of Rank, in his insistence on the fundamental dynam ic of the fear of life and death, and man's urge to transcend this fear in a cul­ turally constituted heroism .. My previous writings did not take sufficient account of truly vicious human behavior. This is a dilemma that I have been caught in, along with many others who have been trying to keep alive the Enlightenment tradition of a science of man: how to reflect the empirical data on man, the data that show what a horribly destruc­ tive creature he has been throughout his history, and yet still have science that is not manipulative or cynical. If man is as bad as

a

he seems, then either we have to behaviorally coerce him into the good life or else we have to abandon the hope of a science of man xvii

Xviii

PREFACE

entirely. This is how the alternatives have appeared. Obviously it is an enormous problem : to show that man is truly evil-causing in much of his motivation, and yet to move beyond this to the possi­ bilities of sane, renewing action, some kind of third alternative be­ yond bureaucratic science and despair. Whether I have succeeded in leaving open the possibility for such a third alternative, while looking man full in the face for the first time in my career, is now for others to say. In the process of writing

this book I compiled a pile of slips with things to say in the Preface, about the matters on which my mind has largely changed, those on which my views remain the same, etc. But this would be redundant; it would be easy for any interested student to trace-if he had the inclination to-the errors and wanderings, the inevitable record of personal growth and sobering up that characterize a so-called sci­ entific career. Let me just say that if I have changed my views on many things, this change leaves intact, I believe, the basic premise of the Enlightenment which I feel we cannot abandon and continue to be working scientists-namely, that there is nothing in m an or nature which would prevent us from taking some control of our destiny and making the world a saner place for our children. This is certainly harder, and more of a gamble, than I once thought; but maybe this should reinforce our dedication and truly tax our imagi­ nations . Many of us have been lazy or smug, others too hopeful and naive. The realism of the world should make us better scien­ tists. There is a distinct difference between pessimism , which does not exclude hope, and cynicism , which does. I see no need, there­ fore, to apologize for the relative grimness of much of the thought contained in this book; it seems to me to be starkly empirical. Since I have been fighting against admitting the dark side of hu­ man nature for a dozen years, this thought can hardly be a simple reflex of my own temperament, of what I naturally feel comfortable with. Nor is it a simple function of our uneasy epoch, since it was gathered by the best human minds of many dispositions and epochs, and so I think it can be said that it reflects objectively the universal situation of the creature we call man. Finally, it goes without saying that this is a large project for one mind to try to put between two covers; I am painfully aware that I may not have succeeded, that I may have bitten off too much

Preface

x.ix

and may have tried to put it too sparely so that it could all fit in. As in most of my other work , I have reach ed far bey ond my competence and h ave probably secured for good a reputation for flamboyant gestu res . But the times still crowd me and give me no rest, and

I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; ei ther grip on the accumulation of thou gh t or we

we get some kind of

cont i nue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I g am ble with science

and write

,

but

the game seems to

me very serious

and

necessary. Research on the book was

aided

by Simon Fraser U ni versity

President's Research Grants. Vancouver, 1972 E.B.

INTRODUCTION

The Human Condition: Between Appetite and Ingenuity

What could we say in the simplest possible way that would "reveal" man to us-show what he was, what he was trying to do, and what

it all added up to? I have been working on this for some years now, trying to make complex things more clear, to peel away dis· guises and marginalia, trying to get at the truly basic things about

man, the things that really drive him.

I now see that we must make

a clear distinction between man's creatureliness-his appetite­ on the one hand and his ingenuity on the other. Man is an animal. The upshot of the modern body of work called

ethology,

of Lionel Tiger, Robin Fox, Konrad Lorenz, and a host of others, is that it reminds us of the basic human condition: that man is first and and foremost an animal moving about on a planet shining in the sun. Whatever else he is, is built on this. The argu· ment of these people is that we shall never understand man if we

do not begin with his animal nature. And this is truly basic. The only

certain

thing we know about this planet is that it is a theater

for crawling life, organismic life, and at least we know what or· ganisms are and what they are trying to do. At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling

life,

has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire

food. Existence, for all organis­

mic life, is a constant struggle to feed-a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a 1

2

ESCAPE

FROM

EVIL

strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked his time-and still bothers ours-is that he showed this bone­ crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person's life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good. Beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the warm contentment of simply continuing to exist-continuing to experience physical stimuli, to sense one's inner pulsations and mus­ culature, to delight in the pleasures that nerves transmit. Once the or­ ganism is satiated, this becomes its frantic all-consuming task, to hold onto life at any cost-and the costs can be catastrophic in the case of man. This absolute dedication to Eros, to perseverance, is universal among organisms and is the essence of life on this earth, and be­ cause we are mystified by it we call it the instinct for self-preserva­ tion. For man, in the words of the anthropologist A. M. Hocart, this organismic craving takes the form of the search for "prosperity"­ the universal ambition of human society. Now, prosperity means simply that a high level of organismic functioning will be main­ tained, and so anything that works against this has to be avoided. In other words, in man the search for appetitive satisfaction has be­ come conscious: he is an organism who knows that he wants food and who knows what will happen if he doesn't get it, or if he gets it but falls ill and fails to enjoy its benefits. Once we have an animal who recognizes that he needs prosperity, we also have one who realizes that anything that works against continued prosperity is bad. And so we understand how man has come, universally, to identify disease and death as the two principal evils of the human organis-

The Human Condition: Between

Appe tite

and Ingenuity

3

mic condition. Disease defeats the joys of prosperity while one is alive, and death cuts prosperity off coldly.

Extinction: The Dread of Insignificance And this brings us to the unique paradox of the human condition: that man wants to persevere as does any animal or primitive or­ ganism; he-.is driven by the same craving to consume, to convert energy, and to enjoy continued experience. But man is cursed with a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable, that his stomach will die. Wanting nothing less than eternal prosperity, man from the very beginning could not live with the prospect of death. As I argued

in The Denial of Death, man erected cultural symbols which do not age or decay to quiet his fear of his ultimate end-and of more im­ mediate concern, to provide the promise of indefinite duration. His culture gives man an alter-organism which is more durable and powerful than the one nature endowed him with. The Muslim heaven, for example, is probably the most straightforward and un­ selfconscious vision of what the human organism really hopes for, what the alter-organism hopes to enjoy. What I am saying is that man transcends death via culture not only in simple (or simple-minded) visions like gorging himself with lamb in a perfumed heaven full of dancing girls, but in much more complex and symbolic ways. Man transcends death not only by continuing to feed his appetites, but especially by finding a meaning for his life, some kind of larger scheme into which he fits: he may believe he has fulfilled Cod's purpose, or done his duty to his ancestors or family, or achieved something which has enriched mankind. This is how man assures the expansive meaning of his life in the face of the real limitations of his body; the "immortal self' can take very spiritual forms, and spirituality is not a simple reflex of hunger and fear. It is an expression of the will to live, the burning desire of the creature to count, to make a difference on the planet because he has lived, has emerged on it, and has worked, suffered, and died.1

4

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

When Tolstoy came to face death, what he really experienced was anxiety about the meaning of his life. As he lamented in his

Confession:

What will come o f my whole life . . . . Is there any meaning in my life th at the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?2

This is m ankind's age-old dilemma in the face of death: it is the meaning of the thing that is of paramount importance; what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignifi­ cance. Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning. And in order for anything once alive to have meaning, its effects m ust remain alive in eternity in some way. Or, if there is to be a "final" tally of the scurrying of

man on earth-a "judgment day"-then this trace of one's life must enter that tally and put on record who one was and that what one did was significant. We can see that the self-perpetuation of organisms is the basic m otive for what is most distinctive about man-namely, religion. As Otto Rank put it, all religion springs, in the last analysis, "not so much from . . . fear of natural death as of final destruction."3 But it is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether it appears purely religious or not. It is very important for students of man to be clear about this : culture itself is sacred, since it is the "religion" that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members. For a long time students of society liked to think in terms of "sacred" versus "profane" aspects of social life. But there has been continued dissatisfaction with this kind of simple dichotomy, and the reason is that there is really no basic distinction between sacred and profane in the symbolic affairs of men. As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcen­ dence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature. Culture is in this sense "supernatural,"' and all systematiza­ tions of culture have in the end the same goal : to raise men above n ature, to assure them that in some ways their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things count.

The

Human Condition: Between Appetite and Ingenuity

5

Now we can get to the point of this brief Introduction and see where it has all been leading. The reader has surely already seen the rub, and objected in his own mind that the symbolic denial of mortality is a figment of the imagination for flesh-and-blood or­ ganisms, that if man seeks to avoid evil and assure his eternal prosperity, he is living a fantasy for which there is no scientific evidence so far. To which I would add that this would be all right if the fantasy were a harmless one. The fact is that self-transcendence via culture does not give man a simple and straightforward solution to the problem of death; the terror of death still rumbles under­ neath the cultural repression ( as I argued in a previous book). 5 What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety are created. And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of men. In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man's ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate. This is the main argument of my book, and in the following chapters I want to try to show exactly how this comes about, how man's impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.

CHAPTER

ONE

The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics

The object of ritual is to secure full life and to escape from evil.... A. M. Hocartl

One can read anthropology for years-even the very best anthropol­ ogy-without ever really understanding what men are trying to do in primitive society. There are so many facts, so many strange customs, and they give a picture so complex and overflowing that there doesn't seem to be a center anywhere, and so we can't get any conceptual grip on the phenomenon. Even the voluminous brilliance of a Levi­ Strauss never really tells us why primitives are doing such complex and ingenious intellectual work. I have read only one anthropologist who has given us the larger view of the primitive world-A. M. Hocart. It is true that Johan Huizinga came close in his Homo Ludens, but Hocart, with his wealth of anthropological data and detail, has brought us to the heart of the matter. Hocart, as I have said, saw the universal human ambition as the achievement of prosperity-the good life. To satisfy this craving, only man could create that most powerful concept which has both made him heroic and brought him utter tragedy-the invention and practice of ritual, which is first and foremost a technique for promot­ ing the good life and averting evil. Let us not rush over these words: ritual is a technique for giving life. The thing is momentous : throughout vast ages of prehistory mankind imagined that it could control life! We scoff at the idea because we do not believe life can be controlled by charms, spells, and magic. But as Hocart warns us, just that we do not believe in the efficacy of the technique is no 6

The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics

7

reason for overlooking the momentous place that ritual has had in the life of mankind.2 The fact is that primitive man imagined he could transfer life from one thing to another, that he could, for example, take the spirit-power that resided in the scalp of an enemy and, by proper dancing and chanties, transfer that life from its former owner to the new one. Or, in the famous totemic increase ceremonies of the Australian aborigines, primitive men imagined that by going through the motions of imitating animal births they could in­ crease the number of kangaroos, emus, grubs in the world. The technique was so precise that the aborigine could even prescribe the color of the kangaroos-brown, say, rather than gray. Or again, the aim of the technique could be general and vast, and make the renovation of the whole universe, the sun, and all the earth. Or, finally, ritual could generate not only bears or yams, or the life of the whole universe, but the individual soul as well. This is the meaning of the "rites of passage" rituals which took place at birth, puberty, marriage, and death: by means of symbolically dying and being reborn via ritual the individual was elevated to new states of being. Life was not a curve as we see it, where birth is zero and death a return to zero. For primitive man birth was zero, but very often death was considered the final promotion of the soul to a state of superhuman power and indefinite durability. I'm sure I don't have to expand on any of this-the literature is familiar to most readers, and in any case there is no substitute for reading the details in Hocart, Mircea Eliade, Henri Frankfort, Jane Harrison, or any of a number of such regaling authorities. The point I want to make is very simple and direct: that by means of the techniques of ritual men imagined that they took firm control of the material world, and at the same time transcended that world by fashioning their own invisible projects which made them super­ natural, raised them over and above material decay and death. In the world of ritual there aren't even any accidents, and accidents, as we know, are the things that make life most precarious and meaningless. Our knees grow weak when we think of a young girl of awesome beauty who gets crushed to death simply because her foot slips on a mountain path; if life can be so subject to

1

8

ESCAPE FROJ\1 EVIL

chance, it mustn't have too much meaning. But how can that be, since we are alive and since creatures are so marvelous? Primitive man

takes care of this problem by imagining that his control over

nature is fairly complete, and that in any case nothing ever happens unless somebody wants it to happen.

S o a person slips on a

mountain path because some powerful dead sp irit is jealous of the l iving , or some witch is secretly working her ritual against that person.3 As I see it, the history of mankind divides into two great periods: the first one existed from time immemorial

until roughly the

Renaissance or Enlightenment, and it was characterized by the

ritualist view of nature. The second period began with the effiores­ cence of the modern machine age and the domination of the

scientific method an d world view.

In

both periods m en wanted to

control life and death, but in the first period they had to rely on a

it: ritual is actually a preindustrial technique of manufacture; it doesn't exactly create new things, Hocart says, but it transfers the power of life and it renovates nonmachine technology to do

nature. But how can we have a technique of manufacture without machinery? Pr ec i s ely by building a ritual altar and m aking that the locus of the transfer and renewal of life power: U nable to take down, repai r, and put together again the actual ma­ chinery [of the world] when it goes wrong, [the ritualist] ... takes to p iec e s and rebuilds their form b y means of the [ rit u a l ] sacrifice. 4

If

the altar represents a person's body (the machinery) that body

may function well or p oorly depending how carefully the altar has

been constructed. As H ocart adds-and as Levi-Strauss has recently conclusively argued-there is no need to postulate a mind differ­ ently constituted from our own. Man controls nature by whatever he can invent, and primitive man invented the ritual altar and the magical paraphernalia to

make it work .

And

as

the

modern

mechanic carries around his tools, so did the primitive s crupulously transport his charms and rebuild his altars. We call it magic because we don't believe it worked, and we call our technology scientific because we believe it works. I am not pretending that primitive magic is as efficacious for the control of nature as is our science, but in our time we are beginning to live

The

Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics

g

with some strange and uncomfortable realizations. Primitive ritual manufacture of life may not have actually controlled the universe, but at least it was never in any danger of destroying it. We control it up to a point-the point at which we seem to be destroying it. Besides, our belief in the efficacy of the machine control of nature has in itself elements of magic and ritual trust. Machines are sup­ posed to work, and to work infallibly, since we have to put all our trust in them. And so when they fail to work our whole world view begins to crumble-just as the primitives' world view did when they found their rituals were not working in the face of western culture and weaponry. I am thinking of how anxious we are to find the exact cause of an airplane crash, or how eager we are to attribute the crash to "human error" and not machine failure. Or even more, how the Russians hush up their air crashes: how can machines fail in machine paradise? The fact that western man didn't know what was going on be­ cause he was faced with a technics so alien to his ways of thought probably explains our long puzzlement over the organization of primitive society. The Australian aborigines-who were living in the Stone Age-seemed the most paradoxical of all, with their luxuriant

systems of

kinship

classification

and

their

complex

divisions of their tribe into half and half and then half again. This passion for splitting things into two polar opposites that were

a most striking and widespread feature of primitive man's social organization. (The Chinese Yin and Yang is a survival of this phenomenon.) A person belonged either to one half or the other, traced his descent from a common ancestor, often

complementary was

identified with a particular animal totem representing his half, usually married someone in the other half, and had rigorously specified types of relationship with people in the other half, includ­ ing the duty to bury them and mourn for them. One of the main things that took place between the halves was something Homo sapiens seems to thrive on: contests of skill and excellence. Hocart thinks that the teasing and mocking behaviors which anthropologists call "joking relationships" may have had their origin there. In fact, it is possible that all team games arose out of the dual organization. Actually the puzzlement mentioned earlier continued until just yesterday. It was laid to rest when Levi-Strauss tackled head on the

10

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

luxuriance of primitive symbolism and classification.5 The result was the complete, widespread, and popular recognition of some· thing anthropologists among themselves had long known: that the primitive mind was just as i ntelligent as ours, just as intent on examining the minute facts of existence and putting order into them. Primitive man fed into his cerebral computer all the important natural facts of this world as he observed and understood them, and tried to relate them intimately to his life just as we try to relate the mechanical laws of the universe to our own . Did we wonder at the complexity of primitive symbolism and social organization? Well, it was because primitive man tried to organize his society to reflect his theory of nature. To quote Huizinga: Anthropology has shown with incre asing clarity how social life in the archaic period normally rests on the antagonistic and antithetical struc­ ture of the community itself, and how the whole mental world of such a community corresponds to this profound dualism.6

Technically we call it "moiety" organization-a dry and forbidding anthropological term that makes the study of primitives so dull, until we give the term life by showing what it means and does . Hocart thought that moiety organization had been nearly universal at some stage of social evolution. Levi-Strauss too was taken with what he regarded as a natural tendency of the human mind to

split things into contrasts and complementarities, which he called "binary opposition." It has given a great boost to the computer freaks, this binary tendency of the primitive mind, because it seems to show that man functions naturally just like the computer-and so the computer can be championed as the logical fulfillment of basic human nature, and the mystery of mind and symbolism might well be traceable down to simple neural circuits, etc. But Hocart did not get carried away into abstractions as many did. H is explanation for this profound dualism lies in the real world of human ambitions and hopes : Perhaps it is a law of nature, but that is not sufficient to explain the dual organization . . . . Nor does it explain the c urious interaction of the

The Primitive World: Ritual

as

Practical Technics

11

it

is this interaction which must explain the dual division; for men divide themselves into two groups in order that they may impart life to one another, that they may intermarry, compete with

moieties; in fact

one another, make offerings to one another, and do to one another what­ ever is required by their theory of prosperity.7

There we have it. Leave it to Hocart to cut through to the heart of the matter. The reason for the dual organization is so foreign to us that we may not at first see it : it was necessary for ritual. The fundamental imperative of all ritual is that one cannot do it alone; man cannot impart life to himself but must get it from his fellow man. If ritual is a technique for generating life, then ritual organi­ zation is a necessary cooperation in order to make that technique work.8 The deeper level of explanation for the dual organization is so simple we may not see it : it is phenomenological. Man needs to work his magic with the materials of this world, and human beings are the primary materials for the magic wrought by social life. We saw in the Introduction that one of the main motives of organismic life was the urge to self-feeling, to the heightened sense of self that comes with success in overcoming obstacles and incorporating other organisms. The expansion of the self-feeling in nature can come about in many different ways, especially when we get to the human level of complexity. Man can expand his self-feeling not only by physical incorporation but by any kind of triumph or dem­ onstration of his own excellence. He expands his organization in complexity by games, puzzles, riddles, mental tricks of all types; by boasting about his achievements, taunting and humiliating his adversaries, or torturing and killing them. Anything that reduces the other organisms and adds to one's own size and importance is a direct way to gain self-feeling; it is a natural development out of the simple incorporation and fighting behavior of lower organisms. By the time we get to man we find that he is in an almost constant struggle not to be diminished in his organismic importance. But as he is also and especially a symbolic organism, this struggle against being diminished is carried on on the most minute levels of sym­ bolic complexity. To be outshone by another is to be attacked at some basic level of organismic durability. To lose, to be second

12

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

rate, to fail to keep up with the best and the highest sends sage to the nerve center of the organism's anxiety : shadowed, inadequate; hence

I

"I

a

mes­

am over­

do not qualify for continued dura­

bility, for life, for eternity; hence

I

will die." William James saw

this everyday anxiety over failure and recorded it with his usual pungent prose : Failure, then failure ! so the world stamps us at every turn. We �trew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation . And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! . . . The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results . . . . And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and everlasting is evidently an integral part of life.9

We just saw why : because it is connected to the fundamental motive of organismic appetite : to endure, to continue experiencing, and to know

that

one can continue because he possesses some

special excellence that m akes him immune to diminution and death. This explains too the ubiquitousness of envy. E nvy is the signal of danger that the organism sends to itself when

a

shadow is being

cast o ver it, when it is threatened with being diminished. Little wonder that Leslie Farber could call envy a p rimary emotional substratum, or that Helmut S choeck could write a whole stimulat­ ing book about envy as a central focus of social behavior. 1 0 The "fear of being reduced . . . almost seems to have a life of its own inside one's being," as Alan Harrington so well put it in of brilliant pages on en vy . 1 1

a

couple

I am making this little detour into phenomenological ontology only to remind the reader of the great stake that the organism has in blowing itself up in size, importance, and durability. Because only if

we

understand how natural this motive is can we understand

how it is only in society that man can get the symbol ic measures for the

deg rees

of his importance, his qualification for extradurabil­

ity. And it is only by contrasting and comparing himself to organisms, to his fellow men,

that

like

he can judge if he has some

extra claim to importance. Obviously it is not very convincing about one's

ultimate worth to be

better

than

a lobster, or even

a

fox ; but

The Primitive World: Ritual

as

Practical Technics

13

to outshine "that fellow sitting over there, the one with the black eyes"-now that is something that carries the convict ion of ulti­ macy. To paraphrase Buber, the faces of men carry the high es t meaning to o ther men. Once we understand this, we can see further why the moiety organization is such a stroke of primitive genius : it sets up society as a continuing contest for the forcing of self-feeling, provides ready-made props fo r self-aggrandizement, a daily script that in­ cludes s traight men for "joking relationships" and talented rivals with whom to contend for social honor in games, feats of strength, hunting and warfare. Sociologists have very ni ce ly described the dynam ics of "status forcing" and similar types of behavior, in which

people try to come out of social encounters a little bigger than they went in, by playing intricate games of oneupmanship. But you cannot force you r status vis-a-vis someone else unless there is

a

someone else and there are rules fo r status and verbal conventions for playing around with status, for coming out of social groups with increased self-inAation. Society almost everywhere provides codes for such self-aggrandizement, for the ability to boast, to humiliate, or just simply to outshine in quiet ways-like displaying

one's superior achievements, even if it is only skill i n hunting that feeds everyone's stomach. If Hocart says that man cannot impart life to himself but must get it via ritual from his fellow man, then we can say even further that man cannot impart importance to himself; and importance, we now s e e is just as deep a problem in securing life : importance equals durability equals life. However, I don't want to seem to be making out that primitive society organized itself merely as a stage for competitive self­ ,

aggrandizement, or that men can only expand their sense of self a t the expense of others . This would not be true, even though i t is a large and evidently natural part of human motivation. Primitive

society also expressed its genius by giving to people much less invidious and competitive forms of self - e xp a n s i o n . I think here of th e work of E rving Coffman, in which he showed with such con­ summate art how people impart to one another the daily sense of importance that each needs, not with rivalry and boasting, but rather with elaborate rules for protecting their insides against social damage and deflation. P eopl e do this in their in terpersonal e n -

14

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

counters by using verbal formulas that express proper courtesies, permit gentle handling, save the other's "face" with the proper subtleties when self-esteem is in danger, and so on. Social life is interwoven with salutations for greeting and taking leave, for ac­ knowledging others with short, standardized conversations which reinforce the sense of well-being of all the members.12 There is no point in repeating Coffman here, or even in trying to sum up . his approach; all I want to do is to say that men in society manage to give to each other what they need in terms of good organismic self-feeling in two major ways : on one hand, by codes that allow people to compare their achievements and virtues so as to outshine rivals; on the other hand, by codes that support and protect tender human feelings that prevent the undermining and deflation that can result from the clash of organismic ambitions. But now to see how the technique for the ritual renewal of nature worked-how well it served the actors who played the parts. We can really only get "inside" primitive societies by seeing them as religious priesthoods with each person having a role to play in the gen�rative rituals. We have so long been stripped of a ritual role to play in creation that we have to force ourselves to try to under­ stand this, to get this into perspective. We don't know what it means to contribute a dance, a chant, or a spell in a community dramatization of the forces of nature-unless we belong to an ac­ tive religious community. 0 Nor can we feel the immense sense of achievement that follows from such a ritual contribution : the ritual­ ist has done nothing less than enable life to continue; he has contributed to sustaining and renewing the universe. If rituals generate and redistribute life power, then each person is a generator of life. That is how important a person could feel, within the ritual­ ist view of nature, by occupying a ritual place in a community. Even the humblest person was a cosmic creator. We may not think • I think a good case could be made for rock music festivals as the modern popular religious experience, the ultimate degenerate form of the ancient ritual dramatization. Rock serves the same function without the cosmic con­ nection, much as the circus does. See Sidney Tarachow's fine little overview, "Circuses and Clowns," in Geza R6heim, ed., Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences ( New York : International Universities Press, 1951 ), vol. 3, pp. 1711 85, and compare this description with a performance by the Alice Cooper rock group.

The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics

15

that the ritual generation o f brown kangaroos is a valid causal affair, but the primitive feels the effect of his ability to generate life, he is ennobled by it, even though it may be an illusion. We may console ourselves about our historical demotion from the status of cosmic heroism by saying that at least we know what true re­ ligion is, whereas these cosmic creators lived according to childish magic. I'll admit that our historical disenchantment is a burden that gives us a certain sober worldliness, but there is no valid difference between religion and magic, no matter how many books are written to support the distinction. As Hocart pointed out so succinctly, magic is religion we don't believe in, and religion is magic we believe in. Voiw tout. What Huizinga did in Homo Ludens was to show that primitive life was basically a rich and playful dramatization of life; primitive man acted out his significance as a living creature and as a lord over other creatures. It seems to me like genius, this remarkable intuition of what man needs and wants; and primitive man not only had this uncanny intuition but actually acted on it, set up his social life to give himself what he needed and wanted. We may know what we lack in modem life, and we brood on it, but twist and sweat as we may we can never seem to bring it off. Perhaps things were simpler and more manageable in prehistoric times and had not gotten out of hand, and so man could act on what he knew. Piimitive man set up his society as a stage, surrounded himself with actors to play different roles, invented gods to address the performance to, and then ran off one ritual drama after the other, raising himself to the stars and bringing the stars down into the affairs of men. He staged the dance of life, with himself at the center. And to think that when western man first crashed uninvited into these spectacular dramas, he was scornful of what he' saw. That was because, as Huizinga so well argued, western man was already a fallen creature who had forgotten how to play, how to impart to life high style and significance. Western man was being given a brief glimpse of the creations of human genius, and like a petulant imbecile bully who feels discomfort at what he doesn't understand, he proceeded to smash everything in sight. Many people have scoffed at Coffman's delineation of the every­ day modern rituals of face-work and status forcing; they have

16

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

argued that these types of petty sel f-promotion might be true of modern organization men hopelessly set adrift in · bureaucratic society but these kinds of shallow oneupmanship behaviors couldn't possibly be true of man everywhere. Consequently, these critics say, Coffman may be a perceptive observer of the contemporary scene, of the one-dimensionality of mass society, but he is definitely not talking about human nature. I have noted elsewhere that I think these critics of Coffman are very wrong, and I repeat i t here be­ cause it is more in context with the deeper understanding

of

primitive society. When you set up society to do creation rituals, then you obviously increase geometrically the m agnitude of im­ portance that organisms can impart to one another. It is only in modern soci ety that the mutual imparting of self-importance has trickled down to the simple maneuvering of face-work; there is hardly any way to get a sense of value except from the boss, the company dinner, or the random social encounters in the elevator or on the way to the executive toilet. It is pretty demeaning-but that is not Coffman's fault, it is the playing out of the historical deca­ dence of ritual. Primitive society was a formal organization for the apotheosis of man. Our own everyday rituals seem shallow pre­ cisely because they lack the cosmic connection. Instead of only using one's fellow man as a mirror to make one's face shine, the primitive used the whole cosmos. I think it is safe to s ay that primitive organization for ritual is the paradigm and ancestor of all face-work, and that archaic ritual was nothing other than in­ depth face-work; it related the person to the mysterious forces

of

the cosmos, gave him an intimate share in them. This is why

the primitive seems multidimensional to many present-day anthro­ pologists who are critical of modern mass society. So far I have been talking vaguely and in generalities about the "cosmic connection";

I

merely mentioned and skipped by the fact

that primitive society was

organized

according to a particular

theory of nature, hence the luxuriance of its symbolisms and the formalism of its organization. Now we have to see what this means. As ritual is an organization for life, it has to be carried out according to a particular theory of prosperity-that is, how exactly to get nature to give more life to the tribe. The most striking thing to us about the primitive theory of prosperity is how elemental it

The Primitive World: Ritual

as Practical Technics

17

was-or organic, as we would say today. Primitive man observed nature and tried to disc ern in it what made the dance of life-where the power came from, how th ings became fecund. If you are going to generate life, you h ave to determine its principles and imitate the th i n gs that embody them. O rg a nisms respond naturally to the sun, which gives heat an d l i gh t , and fi nd th e i r richness in the ea rth , which produces food ou t of n oth i n g-or rather out of its mysterious bowels. The Australian aborigines have an expression about the sun's ray s h a vi n g intercourse with the earth . Very e a rly man seems to have isolated the p ri n c i p l es of fecundity and fertilization and trie d to promote them by i mperso nat in g them. And so men i denti fied with the sky or the heavens, and the earth, and divided them­ selves into heavenly people and earthly ones. Hocart sums it up nicely : ­

In cosmic rites the whole world is involved, but in two parts, sky and earth, because all prosperity is conceived to be due to the orderly inter­ action of sky and earth. The sky a"! one cannot create, nor the earth alone bring forth. Therefore in the ritual that regulates the world there must be two principles and they must be male and female, for the interplay of the earth and sky is analogous to the intercourse of sexes. 13

The moieties stood for these opposing yet complementary principles. world was divided not only irito sky and earth but also into right and left, light and darkness, power and weakness-and even life and death. 14 The point was that reality in the round had to be represented in order for it to be controlled. The primitive knew that death was an important part of creation, and so he embodied death in order to control it. Modem man has long since abandoned the ritual renewal theory of nature, and reality for us is simply refusing to acknowledge that evil and death are constantly with us. With medical science we want to banish death, and so we deny it a place in our conscious­ ness. We are shocked by the vulga rity of symbols of death and the devil and sexual intercourse in primitive ruins. But if your theory is to control by representation and imitation, then you have to in­ clude all sides of life, not only the side that makes you comfortable or that seems pur est The

.

18

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

There are two words which sum up very nicely what the primitive was up to with his social representation of nature : "microcosmiza­ tion" and "macrocosmization ." Although they sound technically forbidding, they express quite simple complementary maneuvers. In macrocosmization man simply takes himself or parts of himself and blows them up to cosmic importance. Thus the popular ancient pastime of entrail reading or liver reading : it was thought that the fate of the individual, or a whole army or a country, could be dis­ cerned in the liver, which was conceived as a small-scale cosmos. The ancient Hindus, among others, looked at every part of man as having a correspondence in the macrocosm : the head corresponded to the sky, the eye to the sun, the breath to the wind, the legs to the earth, and so on. H ' With the universe reflected in his very body, the Hindu thus thought his life had the order of the cosmos. Microcosmization of the heavens is merely a reverse, comple­ mentary movement. Man humanizes the cosmos by projecting all imaginable earthly things onto the heavens, in this way again intertwining his own destiny with the immortal stars. So, for ex­ ample, animals were projected onto the sky, star formations were given animal shapes, and the zodiac was conceived. By man's trans­ ferring animals to heaven all human concerns took on a timelessness and a superhuman validity. The immortal stars came to preside over human destiny, and the fragile and ephemeral animal called man blew himself up to super­ human size by making himself the center of things. Campsites and buildings were all laid out according to some kind of astronomical plan which intertwined human space with the immortal spheres. The place where the tribe lived was conceived as the navel of the universe where all creative powers poured forth. For those who want to investigate further the splendid literature on this topic, Rank brilliantly summed up in the 1930s the accumu­ lation of the intensive research of the early decades of the century.16 All I want to do is to emphasize that by means of micro- and macrocosmization man humanized the heavens and spiritualized the earth and so melted sky and earth together in an inextricable unity. By opposing culture to nature in these ways, man allotted to him­ self a special spiritual destiny, one that enabled him to transcend

The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics

19

his animal condition and assume a special status in nature. No longer was he an animal who died and vanished from the earth; he was a creator of life who could also give eternal life to himself by means of communal rituals of cosmic regeneration. 0 And so we have come full circle in our overview of the primitive world. We started with the statement that primitive man used the dual organization to affirm his organismic self-feeling, and one of his principal means was the setting up of society in the form of organized rivalry. Now we can conclude that he in fact set up the whole cosmos in a way that allowed him to expand symbolically and to enjoy the highest organismic pleasures : he could blow the self-feeling of a mere organismic creature all the way up to the stars. The Egyptians hoped that when they died they would ascend to heaven and become stars and thus enjoy eternal significance in the scheme of things. This is already a comedown from what primitive social groupings enjoyed: the daily living of divine significance, the constant meddling into the realm of cosmic power. I said that primitive society was org;1nized for contests and games, as Huizinga showed, but these were not games as we now think of them. They were games as children play them : they actually aimed to control nature, to make things come out as they wanted them. Ritual contests between moieties were a play of life against death, forces of light against forces of darkness. One side tried to thwart the ritual activities of the other and defeat it. But of course the side of life always contrived to win because by this victory primitive man kept nature going in the grooves he needed and wanted. If death and disease were overtaking a people, then • In anthropology Levi-Strauss has recently revived this opposition of cul­ ture to nature, but he is somehow content to leave it as an intellectual problem. Whe reas it is obvious-as i t was to Rank and Van der Leeuw­ opposition: that man has something great at stake in this opposition : the control and allaying of creature anxiety. Octavio Paz has understood understood how central the problem of overcoming death was to the primitive, and has criticized Levi­ Strauss for completely glossing over the vital human motives for primitive man's talent at symbolism. See 0. Paz, Claude Levi-S trauss ( Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1970 ) and also the important attempt to reorient Levi­ Strauss in the direction of the problem of death : J. Fabian, "How Others Die," in Arien Mack, ed., Social Research ( a publication of the New School for Social Research ) , 1972, 39, number 3: 543-567.

20

ESCAPE FR0�1 EVIL

a ritually enacted reversal of death by a triumph of the life faction would, hopefully, set things right again.17 0

The Logic of Sacrifice At the center of the primitive technics of nature stands the act of sacrifice, which reveals the essence of the whole science of ritual; in a way we might see it as the atomic physics of the primitive world view. The sacrificer goes through the motions of performing in m iniature the kind of arrangement of nature that he wants. H e may u s e water, clay, a n d fi r e to represent the sea, earth, a n d sun, and he proceeds to set up the creation of the world. If he does things exactly as prescribed, as the gods did them in the beginning of time, then he gets control over the earth and creation. He can put vigor into animals, milk into females, and even arrange the order of society into castes, as in the Hindu ritual.

In the H in d u ritual and in coronation rituals, this is the point at which the contest came in. In order to control nature, m a n must drive away evil-sickness and death. And so he must overcome demons and hostile forces. If he makes a slip in the ritual, it gives power to the demons . The ritual triumph is thus the winning of a contest with evil. When kings were to be crowned they had to

prove their merit by winning out against the forces of evil ; dice and chess probably had their origin as the way of deciding whether the king really could outwit and defeat the forces of darkness . 1 8 We s a i d earlier that western man d i d n o t understand this kind

of technics and so he ridiculed it. Hocart comes back again and again to this point, that our notions of what is possible are not the same as those of archaic men. They believed that they could put

vigor into the world by means of a ceremony, that t h ey could create

• We will see later, when we consider the historical evolut i on of evil, how fateful these ritual enactments were for the future of mankind. By opposing the forces of l ight and darkness, and by n ee ding to make light triumph over dark, primitive man was obliged to give the ascen dan cy to the actors representing light and l ife . In this way, as we shall see, a natural inequality was built i nto ·soci al o rg anizatio n , and as Hocart so s up erbly s pec ula tes, this gave rise to the evolution of privileged " pure" groups and outcast "evil" ones.

The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics

21

keep the sun on its course, etc. tu The whole thing seemed r i di cu l ou s to us because we looked only at the surface of it and did not see the logic behind it, the forces th a t were really at work ac co r d i n g to the primitive's under­ standing of them . There is no po int in my si mpl y repeating Hocart's penetrating analys i s of the l ogi c of the equivalence of the sacrificer and the universe.20 The key idea underlying the whole thi n g is that as the sacrificer manipulates the altar and the victim, he becomes identified with them-not with them as things, but with the essences behi nd them, their invisible connection to the world o f the gods and spirits, to the very i n s i de s of nature. And this too is l og ical The primitive had a co n cep tual ization of the insides of nature just as we do in our atomic theory. He saw that things were anima'ted by in­ visible forces, that the sun's heat worked at a distance and per­ vaded the things of the earth, that seeds germinated out of the invisible as did children, etc. All he wanted to do, with the tech­ nique of sacrifice, was to take possession of these invisible forces and use them for the benefit of the community.21 He had no need for missile launchers and atomic reactors; sacrificial altar mounds served his purposes well. In a word, the act of sacrifice established a footing in the in­ visible dimension of reality; this permitted the sacrificer to build a divine body, a mystical, essential self that had superhuman powers. Hocart warns us that if we think this is so foreign to our own traditional ways of thinking, we should look closely at the Christian communion. By performing the prescribed rites the communicant unites himself with Christ-the sacrifice-who is Cod, and in this way the w orshiper accrues to himself a mystical body or soul which has immortal life. Everything depends on the prescribed ritual, which puts one in possession of the power of eternity by union with the sacrifice. a n island, an abundance of creatures,

.

Conclusion

What I have done in these few pages is to try to show that primitive society was organized for a certain kind of production of life, a

22

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

ritual technique of manufacture of the things of the world that used the dimension of the invisible. Man used his ingenuity to fill his stomach, to get control of nature for the benefit of his organism; this is only logical and natural . But this stomach-centered character­ istic of all culture is something we easily lose sight of. One reason is that man was never content to just stop at food : he wanted more life in the widest sense of the term-exactly what we would expect an organism to want if it could somehow contrive to be self­ conscious about life and death and the need to continue experienc­ ing.2� Food is only one part of that quest ; man quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment and had to conceive ways to qualify for immortality. In this way the simple food quest was transmuted into a quest for spiritual excellence, for goodness and purity. All of man's higher spiritual ideals were a continuation of the original quest for energy-power. Nietzsche was one of the first to state this blatantly, and he shocked the world with it : that all morality is fundamentally a matter of power, of the power of organisms to continue existing by reaching for a superhuman purity. It is all right for man to talk about spiritual aims ; what he really means is aims for merits that qualify him for eternity. This too, of course, is the logical development of organismic ambitions. Hocart ends his noted work

Kingship with just such a com­

mentary on the evolution of spirituality out of the simple quest for physical life : Thus the sacrificial lamb is no longer the young of an ewe slaughtered at the Paschal Feast as the embodiment of some god in order to promote the life of the crops, but a symbol expressing . . . a sum of innocence, purity, gentleness, self-sacrifice, redemption and divinity . . . . Doubtless

many wi l l be scandalized at any attempt to derive the cure of souls

from the cravings of the stomach . . . . Even so the rising generation may find cause not for anger, but for wonder, in the rapidity with which Man, so late emerged from the brute, has proceeded from the conquest of matter to that of the spirit.23

No one would dare gainsay the profoundly unselfish and spiritual emotions that man is capable of. As a creature he is most attuned to the living miracle of the cosmos and responds to that miracle with

The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics a

23

fineness and a nobility that are in themselves wondrous ; the whole

thing is surely part of a divine mystery. But the step from the stomach quest to the spiritual one is not in itself as idealistic as Hocart wmild seem to make out. The earning of spiritual points is the initial impetus of the search for purity, however much some few noble souls might transmute that in an unselfish direction . For most men faith in spirituality is merely a step into continued life, the exact extension of the organismic stomach project. There is a small debate being aired in certain circles of anthro­ pology today about the many ways in which primitive life was superior to our own. Levi-Strauss himself has taken

a

stand in favor

of the primitive.24 I don't want to go into the pros and cons of it and the many subtle and vali d arguments produced on both sides. But it does help us to understand the primitive world if we agree to the old anthropological tenet about "the psychic unity of man­ kind"-that is, that m an everywhere, no matter how exotic a particular culture, is basically standard vintage

Homo sapiens,

i nterchangeable in his nature and motives with any other human being. This is what the whole movement to rehabilitate the primi­ tive-from H ocart to Levi- Strauss-has been about : to show that he is basically no different from ourselves and certainly not inferior mentally or emotionally. Well, having agreed that the primitive is no worse than we are, it might be in order to add that he is no better. Otherwise, as we shall see, we cannot really understand what happened in history, unless we try to make out that a different ani mal developed, nor can we understand the problems of modern society, unless we pretend that modern man is a wholly degenerate type of

Homo sapiens.

What I am saying is that if modern man seems mad in his ob­ session to control nature by technology, primitive man was no less obsessed by his own mystical technics of sacrifice. After all, one of the things we have learned from the modern study of mental illness is that to make the body the referent of the whole cosmos

is a techn ique of madness .25 It is true that by institutionalizing macrocosmization, primitive man made it a normal way of referri ng oneself to transcendent events. But this kind of "normality" is itself unreal, it blows man up to an abnormal size, and so we are right to consider it self-defeating, a departure from the truth of the

24

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

human condition . If the primitive was not less intelligent, he was equally not less intent on self-perpetuation . When we "step ofF' into history, we seem to see a type of man who is m ore driven­ but this is only because he started off already obsessed with control and with a hunger for immortality. It is true that primitive man was kinder to n ature, that he did not cause the kind of destructive­ ness we are causing and, in fact, did not seem capable of our kind of casual disregard for the bounty of the natural world. It would take a lot of study and compilation of comparative data to bear these impressions out, but I think that if primitive man was kinder to nature, it was not because he was innately different in his emotional sensitivity nor more altruistic toward other living forms than we are. I think, rather, that it was because his technics cif manipulation was less destructive. He needed a tree, the spirit of an animal or plant, the sacrifice of one animal of a species . As we shall see, we grind up astronomically larger quantities of life, but i t is in the sam e spirit and for the same basic reasons . If we talk about a certain primitive quality of "reverence" for life, we must be very careful. The primitives' attitude toward animals considered sacred was sometimes more cruel than our own is. They did not hesitate to s acrifice those whom they considered their benefactors or their gods , or even hesitate to kill their chiefs and kings. The main value was whether this brought life to the community and whether the ritual demanded it.2" Man has always casually sacrificed life for more life. Probably more to the point, man has always treated with con­ sideration and respect those parts of the natural world over which he has had no control . As s oon as he was sure of his powers, his respect for the mystery of what he faced diminished. H ocart makes a telling point about the evolution of man's attitude toward animals : As his superiority and mastery over the rest of the living world became more and more apparent he seems to have become more and more anxious to disclaim relationship with animals, especially when worship became associated with respect. There is no objection to an animal's being the obje ct of a cult when this does not imply respect but is merely a procedure for causing the animal to multiply. It is a very different thing when ritual becomes worship; man is loath to abase himself be­ fore an animaJ.27

The

Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics

25

Hocart attributes this to "the growing conceit of man." But we could just as well see it as a result of natu ral narcissism. Each organism preens itself on the specialness of the life that throbs within i t, and is ready to subordinate all others to its own continua­ tion. Man was always conceited; he only began to show his destruc­ tive s ide to the rest of nature when the ritual technology of the spiritual production of animals was superseded by other technol­ ogies. The unfolding of history is precisely the saga of the succession of n�w and di fferent ideologies of organismic self-perpetuation­ and the new injustices and heightened destructiveness of historical man. Let us turn to this .

CHAPTER TWO

The Primitive World: Economics as Expiation and Power

Now that we have talked about how primitive man created or h elp ed create natural bounty, we have to look at what he did

with

this b ounty, how he applied his concept of the natural order of things in daily life in addition to performing it in ritual. When we put these two aspects together, they give us a fairly complete p i ctu re of primitive society, of how man lived th ro u gh long periods of prehistory.

It oft en happens that we get our most important insights from people outside a field, and anthropology is no exception H uizinga, as mentioned, is one such outsider who has helped us unders tand .

primitive society. Norman 0. Brown is anoth er ; his analysis of

p rimiti ve economics literally brims with insights. 1 What makes his discussion so seminal is that he has combined essential, often overlooked work from classical anthropology and psychoanalysis in his analysis of economic motives. But his psychoanalysis, unlike R6heim's, is not the dogmatic Freudian kind, and it has not been brought to bear on p rimiti v e society in order to prove Freud righ t . 2 The whole burden of Brown's argument is to show that economic activity itself, from th e dawn of human society to the present time,

i s sacred to the core.3 It is not a rational, secular activity designed simply to meet human survival needs . Or, better, i t is not only that, never was, and never will be. If it were, how explain man's drive to create a surplus, from the very beginning of society to the present? How explain man's willingness to forgo pleasure, to deny

himself, in order to produce beyond his capacity to consume? Why do people work so hard to create useless goods when they already have enough to eat? We know that primitives amassed huge pi l es of food and other goods often only to ce re m oni ously destroy them, just as we continue to do. We know that many of 26

The Primitive World: Economics as Expiation and Power

27

their choicest trade items, such as bits of amber, were entirely superfluous; that many of their most valuable economic possessions created with painstaking labors were practically useless, e.g., the big ceremonial axe-blade of the Trobriands. And finally we know that historically this creation of useless goods got out of hand and led to the present plight of men-immersed in a horizon of pol­ luting junk, besieged by social injustice and class and race op­ pression, haves and have-nots, all grasping, fighting, shoving, not knowing how they got into their abysmal condition or what it all means. Let us now tum to what is probably one of the most vital chapters in man's self-understanding.

Economics as Expiation

What was the "economic" activity most characteristic of primitive society? Marcel Mauss revealed it a half century ago in his famous study The Gift.4 There he showed, from a sample of many diverse societies, that the giving of gifts between groups and individuals was the heart of archaic social systems. On the primitive level we see compellingly that social life is a continual dialogue of gift giving and counter gift giving. To the anthropological observer the thing was simply marvelous: goods were shared and freely given; men observed the principle of social reciprocity and respected social obligations to the letter. When there was food, there was food for all; the hunter who killed the game distributed it with pride and often took the least desirable part of the animal for himself. As Brown says, this was the core of truth in the myth of primitive communism. If someone had something you wanted, you asked for it and received it. But often this continuous gift giving and taking seemed to the western observer to be perverse; a native would work very hard at the trading post to earn a shirt, and when he came back a week later someone else would be wearing it. Westerners could only think that this represented a basic lack of responsibility, a kind of simple­ mindedness. It is so alien to our "I got mine-you get yours" philosophy. Or more alarmingly, missionaries would find that na-

28

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

tives came to their hut and simply took valuable knives, guns, clothes, etc., without so much as a "thank you," as though these were coming to them. How could traders, missionaries, and administrators understand something that often eluded anthropologists themselves : that primi­ tive man did not act out of economic principles, that the process of freely giving and receiving was embedded in a much larger, much more important cosmology, that since the white man had destroyed the old gods and replaced them, he had to give freely just as the gods had done. Primitive life was openly immersed in debt, in obligation to the invisible powers, the ancestors, the dead souls; the group lived partly by drawing its powers from the non­ living. Unlike us, primitives knew the truth of man's relation to nature : nature gives freely of its bounty to man-this was the miracle for which to be grateful and beholden and give to the gods of nature in return. Whatever one received was already a gift, and so to keep things in balance one had to give in return-to one another and, by offerings, to the spirits. The gods existed in order to receive gifts. This helps us understand why primitive society seems so "masochistic" to us in its willing submission to nature and to dead spirits. It had found the perfect formula for keeping things in balance : In the archaic consciousness the sense of indebtedness exists together with the illusion that the debt is payable; the gods exist to make the debt payable. Hence the archaic economy is embedded in religion, limited by the religious framework, and mitigated by the consolations of religion-above all, removal of indebtedness and guilt.5

And this explains too the thing that has puzzled thinkers since the beginning of the study of man : why weren't natives content to live in the primitive "paradise," why couldn't man simply relax and consume nature's bounty, why was he driven from the very beginning to develop a surplus beyond basic human needs? The answer is that primitive man created an economic surplus so that he would have something to give to the gods; the giving of the surplus was an offering to the gods who controlled the entire economy of nature in the first place, and so man needed to give

-

-- -----

------

The Primitive World: Economics as Expiation a nd Power

zg

precisely in order to keep himself immersed in the cosmology of obligation and expiation. The ceremonial destruction of mountains of precious food was just that : a ceremonial, religious act. The painstaking fabrication of charms or the dangerous hunting down of rare objects like whale's teeth represented the sweat of one's brow for the most vital motive man knew : to keep the cycle of power moving from the invisible to the visible world. When man gives, "the stream of life continues to flow," as Van der Leeuw so beautifully summed it up in his classic study of primitive ideas.8 In order to understand this, we have to abandon our own notions of what a gift is. It is not a bribe by one who is a stranger t0 you and simply wants to "get in good" with you, or by a loved one who wants to draw close to you or even selflessly give you pleasure.

Economics as Power In the first place, for the primitive the gift was

a

part of the stream

of nature's bounty. Many people today think that the primitive saw the world more under the aspect of miracle and awe than we do, and so he appreciated elemental things more than we do. In order to recapture this way of looking at nature, we modems usually have to experience a breakdown and rebirth into naive perception. So, for example, when Hamann was asked what Chris­ tianity meant to him, he said it was a search for the elements of bread and wine. But we don't need to romanticize about the primitive ( whether truly or not ) in order to understand his valu­ ation of nature's bounty. We saw that the main organismic motive was self-perpetuation; it is logical that when self-perpetuation became a conscious problem at the level of man he naturally tended to value those things that gave him the power to endure, those things that incorporated the sun's energy and that gave warmth and life. Food is a sacred element because it gives the power of life. The original sacrifice is always food because this is what one wants from the gods as the basis for life. "Give us our daily bread . . . . " Furthermore, if food contains power, it is always

30

ESCAPE

FROM

EVIL

more than itself, more than a physical thing: it has a mysterious

inner essence or spirit. Milk is the essence of the cow, shark's teeth are the essence of the shark's vitality and murderousness, etc. So when primitive man gave these things as gifts, he did not give a dead thing, a mere object as it appears to us-but a piece of life, of spirit, even a part of himself because he was immersed in the stream of life. The gifts had mana power, the strength of super­ natural life. This is what made the bond and allowed the stream to flow between giver and receiver: to give and then to counter-give kept the motion going, preserved the cycle of power. This is how we are to understand the potlatch giving and oneupmanship, the de­ struction of quantities of goods : the eternal flux of power in the broad stream of life was generated by the greatest p ossible e x­ penditure; man wanted that stream to flow as bountifully as pos­ sible.7 It then became hard to distinguish who gave and who received, since all were bathed in the power of the movement : everyone participated in the powers that were opened up-the giver, the community, the gods. "I give you power so that you may have power." The more you give, the more everyone gets. This feeling of expenditure as power is not strange to us modems either. We want to keep our goods moving with the same obses­ sive dedication-cars, refrigerators, homes, money. We feel that there is health and strength in the world if the economy nwves, if there is a frenzy of buying and tradin g on the stock market, activity in the banks; and this is not only because the movement of goods piles up money in the bank, but actually reflects, I think, the sense of trust and security that the magical free-enterprise powers are working for us so long as we continue to buy, sell, and move goods. The Soviets are experiencing the same thing : the sense of er.hilaration and self-celebration in the movement of pro­ duction and consumption of goods. Like the primitive, modern man feels that he can prosper only if he shows that he already has power. Yet of course in its one-dimensionality this is a cari­ cature on the primitive potlatch, as most of modem power ideology is; it has no anchor in the invisible world, in the deference to the gods. Primitive man gave to the gods. Hocart sees this as the origin of trade : the fact that one group made offerings to the gods

The Primitive World:

Economics

as Expiation and Power

31

o f their kinsmen and vice versa. This led t o the exchange o f dif­ ferent stuffs between different groups, and in it we see the direct

motive of the creation of a surplus for exchange. The exchange of a kind of contest-who could give the m ost

o fferings was always

to the gods of their kinsmen. We can see what this did for a

person : it gave him a contest in which he could be victorious if

his offerings of surplus exceeded those of the other clan. In a

word, it gave him cosmic heroism, the distinction of releasing the

most power in nature for the benefit of all. H e was a h ero in the

eyes not only of the gods but also of men; he earned social honor,

"the right to crow."8 He was a "big power" man. Thus we can see in gift giving and potlatch the continuation of the triumph of the

hunter, but now in the creation and distribution of one's own fabricated surplus. R6heim very aptly called this state of things

"narcissistic capitalism" : the equation of wealth with magic power.9

And so all this seemingly useless surplus, dan gerously and pains­ takingly wrought, yields the highest usage of all in terms of p ower. Man, the animal who knows he is not safe here, who needs con­

tinued affirmation of his powers, is the one animal who is im­

placably driven to work beyond animal needs precisely because he is not a secure animal. The origin of human drivenness is relig ious because man experiences creatureliness; the amassing of a surplus,

then, goes to the very heart of human motivation, the urge to stand out as a hero, to transcend the limitations of the human condition and achieve victory over impotence and finitude.

We see, too, as Brown says, that in the strict utilitarian sense in

which we unders tand the term, primitive "work" cannot be eco­ nomic; for instance, our "common ownership" and "collective en­ terprise" in which the person is a "partner" do not do just ice to the multidimensionality of the primitive world. Primitive man worked so that h e could win a contest in which the offering was m ade to the gods; he got spiritual merit for h is labors . I suppose

early Calvinism was an echo of this performance for the eyes of men and the gods, but without the continual giving, the redistri­ bution of the most precious goods. "Big men" in primitive society were those who gave away the most, had nothing for themselves. Sometimes a chief would even offer his own life to appease an injured party in a quarrel ; his role was often nothing else than

32

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

to be a vehicle for the smooth How of life in the tribe. ( The resemblance to historical Calvinism ends abruptly at this kind of performance for spiritual merit. ) This reveals a central fact about social life : primitive man immersed himself in a network of social obligations for psychological reasons. Just as Rank said, man has to have a core psychological motive for being in the group in the first place, otherwise he would not be a group-living animal. Or as Brown, who likes to call a spade a spade, put it, "man entered social organization in order to share guilt. Social organization . . . is a structure of shared guilt . . . a symbolic mutual confession of guilt."10 And so in one sweep we can understand how primitive economics is inexorably sacred, communal, and yet psychologically motivated at the same time.

The Nature of Guilt But this kind of picture risks putting primitive man even further beyond our comprehension, even though it seems logically to ex­ plain what he was doing. The problem is in the key motive, guilt. Unless we have a correct feeling for what guilt is, what the ex­ perience of it means, the sacred nature of primitive economics may escape us. We may even prefer our illusionless "economic man" to the "pitiful'' primitives-and this result will entirely undo Brown's thesis. But he himself is in some measure to blame. He draws partly on Nietzsche and Freud, and some of their scam of guilt as a weakness seems to have rubbed off on him. Even more seriously, by his own admission he does not have any theory of the nature of guilt ( "Whatever the ultimate explanation of guilt may be

.

.

. " ) 1 1 even though he bases his whole argument on it.

When he does offer one explanation, he makes of guilt a simple reflex of the repression of enjoyment-something for which he has already so well castigated Freud

in discussing the problem of

anality : "The repression of full enjoyment in the present inevitably releases aggression against those ancestors out of love of whom the repression was instituted. Aggression against those simulta­ neously loved is guilt."12 This is one explanation of guilt that comes from psychoanalysis :

The Primitive World: Economics as Expiation and Power

33

the child in his boundless desires for gratification can't help feeling love for those who respond to him; at the same time, when they inevitably frustrate him for his own good, he can't help feeling hate and destructive impulses toward them, which puts him in an impossible bind. The bind is one kind of guilt, but only one aspect of the total bind of life which constitutes the immense burden of guilt on the human psyche. • One of the reasons guilt is so difficult to analyze is that it is itself "dumb." It is a feeling of being blocked, limited, transcended, without knowing why. It is the peculiar experience of an organism which can apprehend a totality of things and not be able to move in relation to it. Man experiences this uniquely as a feeling of the crushing awesomeness of things and his helplessness in the face of them. This real guilt partly explains man's willing subordinacy to his culture; after all, the world of men is even more dazzling and miraculous in its richness than the awesomeness of nature. Also, subordinacy comes naturally from man's basic experiences of being nourished and cared for; it is a logical response to social altruism. Especially when one is sick or injured, he experiences the healing forces as coming from the superordinate cultural system of tools, medicines, and the hard-won skills of persons. An attitude of humble gratitude is a logical one to assume toward the forces that sustain one's life; we see this very plainly in the learning and development of children. Another reason that guilt is so diffuse is that it is many different things : there are many different binds in life. One can be in a bind in relation to one's own development, can feel that one has not achieved all one should have. One can be in a bind in relation to one's body, which is the guilt of anality: to feel bound and doomed by one's physical appendages and orifices. Man also ex­ periences guilt because he takes up space and has unintended effects on others-for example, when we hurt others without in­ tending to, just by being what we are or by following our natural desires and appetites, not to mention when we hurt others physi­ cally by accident or thoughtlessness. This, of course, is part of the guilt of our bodies, which have effects that we do not intend in • Here I am obliged to repeat thing! I have written elsewhere on gu ilt partly partl y because they are essen ti al to understanding th e primitive and partly because, because,like Brown, I am h av ing a dialogue with myself.

34

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

our inner selves. To use Rank's happy phrase, this is guilt we feel for being a "fate-creating" objecU3 We feel guilt in relation to what weighs on us, a weight that we sense is more than we can handle, and so our wives and children are a burden of guilt because we cannot possibly foresee and handle all the accidents, sicknesses, etc., that can happen to them; we feel limited and bowed down, we can't be as carefree and self-expansive as we would like, the world is too much with us. 14 If we feel guilt when we have not developed our potential, we also are put into a bind by developing too much. Our own unique­ ness becomes a burden to us; we "stick out" more than we can safely manage. Guilt makes sense in relation to evolution itself. Man is on the "cutting edge" of evolution; he is the animal whose development is not prefigured by instincts, and so he is open to becoming what he can. This means literally that each person is already somewhat "ahead of himself" simply by virtue of being human and not animal. No wonder people have almost universally feared the "evil eye" in traditional society : it expresses a natural and age-old reaction to making oneself too prominent, detaching oneself too much from the background of things. In traditional Jewish culture, for example, each time the speaker made a favorable remark about the health or achievement of someone dear to him, he immediately followed this remark with the invocation "Kein Ayin-Hara" ( no evil eye ) , as if to say "may this good fortune and prominence not be undone by being too conspicuous." Some indi­ viduals achieve an intensity of individuation in which they stick out so far that almost each day is an unbearable exposure. But even the average person in any society is already more of an individual than any animal can be; the testimonial to this is in the human face, which is the most individuated animal expression in nature. Faces fascinate us precisely because they are unique, because they stick out of nature and evolution as the most fully developed expression of the pushing of the life force in the intensity of its self-realization. We don't understand why the life force is person­ alizing in this way, what it is trying to achieve; but we flatly know that it is personalizing because we have our heads and faces as empirical testimony, and as a burden of guilt. We might say that the development of life is life's own burden.

The Primitive World: Economics as Expiation and Power

35

I linger on these ontological thoughts for a very good reason : they tell us what is bothering us deep down. If your face is the most individual part of nature, and if its sticking out is a burden to you because you are an embodiment of the cutting edge of evolution and are no longer safely tucked into the background of nature-if this is so, then it follows that it is dangerous to have a head. And I think mankind has always recognized this implicitly, especially on primitive levels of experience. I believe Levin is right when he says that "it is a crime to own a head" in society; histori­ cally societies have not tolerated too much individuation, especially on primitive levels. And Levin may even have something when he adds that this is the simplest explanation of head-hunting.1.5 Well, there can be no one explanation for the widespread passion for head-hunting; 16 but probably the underlying thing that the various forms of head-taking have in common is that the head is prized as a trophy precisely because it is the most personal part, the one that juts most prominently out of nature. In some sense, too, head­ hunting may be a way of projecting onto others one's own guilt for sticking out so much, so that their heads are taken as scapegoats to atone for the guilt. It is as if to say, "This will teach you to stick out so blatantly." Certainly we feel something of this in societies in which decapitation as punishment was practiced and the heads were publicly displayed. This was a destruction of in­ dividuality at its most intensive point, and so a ·vindication of the pool of faces of the community whose laws had been transgressed. If we extend these thoughts one logical step, we can understand a basic psychoanalytic idea that otherwise seems ridiculous : "in the eyes of culture, to live is a crirne."17 In other words, to live is to stick out, to go beyond safe limits; hence it is to court danger, to be a locus of the possibility of disaster for the group. If we take all this into view, we should find more palatable to our understanding what Brown meant when he said that social organization was a structure of shared guilt, a symbolic mutual confession of it. Mankind has so many things that put it into a bind that it simply cannot stand them unless it expiates them in some way. Each person cannot stand his own emergence and the many ways in which his organism is dumbly baffled from within and transcended from without. Each person would literally be

36

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

pulled off his feet and blown away or would gnaw away his own

insides with acid anxiety if he did not tuck himself back into something. This is why the main general characteristic of guilt is that it must be shared : man cannot stand alone. And this is pre­ cisely what B rown means when he says, "Archaic man gives be­ cause he wants to lose; the psychology is . self-sacrificial what the giver wants to lose is guilt."1 8 Or, metaphorically, "In .

.

.

.

.

the gift complex dependence on the mother is acknowledged, and then overcome by mothering qthers."19 Society, in other words, is a

dramatization of dependence and an exercise in mutual safety by the one animal in evolution who had to figure out a way of ap­ peasing himself as well as nature. We can conclude that primitives were more honest about these things-about guilt and debt­ because they were more realistic about man's desperate situation vis-a-vis nature. Primitive man embedded

social life in a sacred

matrix not necessarily because he was more fearful or masochistic than men in later epochs, but because he saw reality more cl�arly in some basic ways. 20 Once we acknowledge this, we have to be careful not to make

too much of it; I mean that group living through the motive of guilt is not all humble and self-effacing. As we saw in our consid­

eration of g i ft giving, not only expiation but the blatant affirmation

If guilt is the experience then immersing oneself in a group is one way of actively defeating it : groups alone can make big sur­ plus, can generate extravagant power in the form of large harvests, of power is a primary impetus behind it. of fear and powerlessness,

the capture of dangerous animals and many of them, the manu­ facture of splendid and intricate items based on sophisticated techniques, etc. From the beginning of time the group has repre­ sented

big power, big victory, much life.

Heroism and Repentance : The Two Sides of Man If we thus look at both sides of the picture of guilt, we can see

that primitive man allocated to himself the two things that man needs mos t : the experience of prestige and power that constitutes

The Primitive World: Economics as Expiation and Power

37

man a hero, and the experience of expiation that relieves him of the guilt of being human. The gift complex took care of both these things superlatively. Man worked for economic surplus of some kind in order to have something to give. In other words, he achieved heroism and expiation at the same time, like the dutiful son who brings home his paper-route earnings and puts them in the family coffer. He protruded out of nature and tucked himself in with the very same gesture, a gesture of heroism-expiation. Man needs self-esteem more than anything; he wants to be a cosmic hero, contributing with his energies to nothing less than the great­ ness and pleasure of the gods themselves. At the same time this risks inflating him to proportions he cannot stand; he becomes too much like the gods themselves, and he must renounce this dan­ gerous power. Not to do so is to be unbalanced, to run the great sin of hubris as the Greeks understood it. Hubris means forgetting where the real source of power lies and imagining that it is in onesel£.21

CHAPTER

THREE

The Origin of Inequality

If there is a class which has nothing to lose but its chains, the chains that bind it are self-imposed, sacred obligations which appear as objective realities with all the force of a neurotic delusion. Norman 0. Brownl

The origin of inequality among men! This was the question that excited thinkers of the eighteenth century as they combed the globe trying to find humanity in an uncorrupted state. From the early voyages and early anthropology they already saw that primitive society was fairly egalitarian, that compared to the civilized world of that time primitives lived what seemed an unspoiled, undriven sort of life, and one that took very little toll on the world around them. It was the same kind of world that Levi-Strauss set out to find in the Amazon a couple of centuries later and for which he wrote the same kind of epitaph as the earlier observers had : A

World on the Wane.2 Nobody was very happy with the way history and civilization had turned out, and many thinkers of that time supposed that if the first steps in the process of the oppression of man by man could be pinpointed, then the decay of civilization might be ar­

rested and even reversed. They believed that if man could be shown how he got into his deplorable condition, he would make every intelligent, scientific effort to get out of it. They supposed too that there was nothing naturally evil in man's nature that would prevent him from being able to build a new social world, once he understood the reasons for the mess he was in. The great Rousseau, with his uncanny intuition of what was sig­ nificant, began it all with his famous "Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men" ( 1755 ) .3 In that essay he 38

The Origin of Inequality

39

reasoned out how man had g radually fallen from his primitive state of innocence into the conflicts of classes and states. The whole story of the influence of Rousseau's ideas is well known and I am not going to repeat it he re . All I want to do is to remind the reader that Rousseau failed to bring about wh a t he hoped for, and so too did the whole tradition which followed him; and I want to sum up why it failed . The Marxist tradition seized on Rousseau's work because it was exactly what the Marxists needed : the accusation that the state acted tyrannically to hold men in bondage, deprived them of the fruits of their labors, and distributed these fruits mostly among the elite. They attempted to remind society of man's concern for his fellows before the exploitation began and said that once man understood that he had the right to enjoy the fruits of meaningful labor, he would rise up and break the shackles which enslaved him. This was the message of the great Manifesto, the authority for the massive revolutions of this century. But the great disillusionment of our time is that none of this has led to the lib eration of man. Masses of people are still being t reated like masses instead of persons, still being sent off like puppets to war, and still slaving all day for purposes they did not fashion or control. In a word, the great revolutions of our time, directed against the state as a structure of dominat i on , have not led to the disappearance of the state, and so they have not led to human equality and freedom. What went wrong? Obviously something with the plans on the original drawing board; Rousseau's answer to the question posed by the Academy of Dijon was not complete or was beside the mark. We have had to conclude that the question of the origin of inequality among men was not answered by the Marxist tradition. This great historical realization is what prompted the work of the leading school of sociology of our time-the Frankfurt school-a work dedicated to going beyond Marx to a new synthesis : a me rger of the materialist and psychological levels of explanation, "the union of Marx and Freud." If it is not only power and coercion that enslave man, then there must be something in his nature that contributes to his down­ fall; since this is so, the state is not man's first and only enemy,

40

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

but he himself harbors an "enemy within." Brown put the problem very well : We are here at one of the ultimate crossroads in social theory . . . . If the cause of the trouble were force, to "expropriate the expropriators" would be enough. But if force did not establish the domination of the master, then perhaps the slave is somehow in love with his own chains . . . a deeper psychological malady . . . . •

Let us review what we know about this "deeper malady." It is a fascinating chapter of psychology in the history of the origins of our inequality. Curiously, Rousseau himself gave one of the very first psycho­ logical explanations in his famous essay. In the famous words which stirred revolutionaries for two centuries he sai d : The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.5

In other words, primitive equality was ended by private property, which led to the differential personal ownership of wealth. But the point is that Rousseau doesn't say that the person took the land by

force, but rather because of something in the minds of those around him. As he outlines his theory of the origin of inequality, he places wealth at the last stage and "personal qualities" at the first stage : it is personal qualities that give rise to distinctions of rank and power, and "wealth is the last to which they are reduced in the end."6 Personal qualities are "the only ones which could attract consideration" : The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality . . . . 7

It is perhaps an irony of history that one of the very first and most influential tracts of modern revolutionaries, a tract that gave the antistatists their clarion call to end the abuses of expropriation and inequality, itself rests on the personal, psychological reasons

The Origin of Inequality

41

for the very first step in the origin of inequality. Social imbalances occur because of differences in personal merit and the recognition of that merit by others. Shortly after Rousseau wrote, Adam Fergu. son came out with his famous work on social history where he too argued that social inequality was relatively absent on primitive levels because property was comparatively absent.8 In the most egalitarian primitive societies, those whose economy is based on hunting and gathering, there is no distinction of rank, little or no authority of one individual over another. Possessions are simple and there is no real difference in wealth; property is distributed equally. Yet even on this level individual differences are recognized and already make for real social differentiation. If there is little or no authority to coerce others, there is much room for influence, and influence always stems from personal qualities : extra skill in hunting and warfare, in dealing with the spirits in the invisible world, or simply physical strength and endurance. Old age itself can often have influence. If a person has outlived others, especially when so many die prematurely, he is often thought to have special powers. Skilled hunters and warriors could actually display these special powers in the form of trophies and ornamental badges of merit. The scalps of the slain enemies and the teeth, feathers, and other ornaments were often loaded with magical power and served as protection. If a man wore a large number of trophies and badges showing how much power he had and how great were his exploits, he became a great mana figure who literally struck terror into the hearts of his enemies.9 The elaborate decorations of the warrior and hunter were not aimed to make him beautiful, but to show off his skill and courage and so inspired fear and respect. This gave him automatic social distinction; by wearing the tokens of his achievements, the visible memories of his bravery and excellence, he could flaunt his superiority in the eyes of everyone who couldn't make similar displays. The Sioux could announce by certain decora­ tions on his moccassins how many horses he had captured, enemies killed, whether the warrior himself had been wounded, etc.; similar things were conveyed by the feathers he wore and the color they were dyed. Among other tribes, war exploits entitled the warrior to mark himself with certain scarifications and tattoos. Each war-

I

42

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

rior was literally a walking record of his military campaigns : the "fruit salad" on the chest of today's military men is a direct de­ scendant of this public announcement of "see who I am because of where I have been and what I have done; look how accom­ plished I am as a death dealer and death defier." It is of course less concrete and living than actual facial and shoulder scars or the carrying of scalps which included the forehead and eyes. But it gives the right to the same kind of proud strutting and social honor and the typical question that the primitive warrior asks : "Who are you that you should talk? Where are your tattoo marks? Whom have you killed that you should speak to me?"1o These people, then, are honored and respected or feared, and this is what gives them influence and power. Not only that, it also gives them actual benefits and privileges. Remember that as chil­ dren we not only deferred to the outstanding boy in the neigh­ borhood but also gave him large chunks of our candy. Primitives who distinguished themselves by personal exploits got the thing that grown men want most-wives. They got them more easily than did others, and often, especially if they were skilled hunters, they took more than one wife. In some cases, too, a noted hunter would claim as his special hunting preserve a piece of land that was common property of the tribe.11 And so on. I don't intend to even try to sum up the theoretical details from the vast literature on the growth of hereditary privilege and private accumulation. Besides, there is little agreement on how exactly class society came into existence. There is general agreement on what preclass society was, but the process of transformation is shrouded in mystery. Many different factors contributed, and it is impossible to pull them apart and give them their proper weight. Also, the process would not have been uniform or unilinear-the same for all societies in all areas. If we add psychological factors to materialist ones, we must also now add ecological and demo­ graphic factors such as population density and scarcity of re­ sources.12 I don't want to pop my head into the argument among authorities lest it get neatly sliced off. So I would like to sidestep the argument while still remaining focused on what is essential, which, I think must lie in human nature and motives. The most sensitive students of the past 200 years would agree that rank and

The

Origin of Inequality

43

stratified societies came into being without anyone really noticing; it just "happened," gradually and ineluctably. The vital question, then, it seems to me, is not exactly how it happened but why it was allowed to happen, what there was in human nature that went along so willingly with the process. The answer to this question seems to me remarkably straight­ forward. I have said that primitive man recognized differences in talent and merit and already deferred to them somewhat, granted them special privileges. Why? Because obviously these qualities helped to secure life, to assure the perpetuation of the tribe. Ex­ ploits in the danger of hunting and war were especially crucial. Why? Because in these activities certain individuals could single themselves out as adept at defying death; the tokens and trophies that they displayed were indications of immortality power or dura­ bility power, which is the same thing. If you identified with these persons and followed them, then you got the same immunities they had. This is the basic role and function of the hero in history : he is the one who gambles with his very life and successfully defies death, and men follow him and eventually worship his memory because he embodies the triumph over what they fear most, ex­ tinction and death. He becomes the focus of the peculiarly human passion play of the victory over death. To go back to Rousseau for a moment, we can now see how fanciful the idea is that in the "state of nature" man is free and only becomes unfree later on. Man never was free and cannot be free from his own nature. He carries within him the bondage that he needs in order to continue to live. As Rank so well taught us, Rousseau simply did not understand human nature in the round : he "was not able to see that every human being is also equally unfree, that is, we are born in need of authority and we even create out of freedom, a prison . . . . "13 This insight is the fruit of the outcome of modem psychoanalysis, and there is no going back behind it to the dreams of Rousseau or the utopian revolution­ aries. It penetrates to the heart of the human condition and to the principal dynamic of the emergence of historical inequality. We have to say, with Rank, that primitive religion "starts the first class distinction."14 That is, the individual gives over the aegis of his own life and death to the spirit world; he is already a second-class

44

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

citizen. The first class distinction, then, was between mortal and immortal, between feeble human powers and special superhuman beings. Once things started off on this footing, it was only natural that class distinctions should continue to develop from this first im­ petus : those individuals who embodied supernatural powers, or could somehow plug into them or otherwise use them when the occasion demanded, came to have the same ability to dominate others that was associated with the spirits themselves. The anthro­ pologist Robert Lowie was a specialist on those most egalitarian of all primitive peoples, the Plains Indian tribes. Even these fiercely independent Indians, he tells us, gave up their equalitarian attitudes of everyday life on raiding parties. A Crow Indian would organize a raid only when prompted by his supernatural guardian spirit, and so all those who followed him deferred to him and to his spirit. Again, the overlordship of the invisible world as embodied in cer­ tain human personages made temporary slaves of their fellows. No one was more cautious than Lowie about making general state­ ments on primitives, yet when it came to speculating about social evolution he made a very straightforward choice: I suggest that the awe which surrounded the protege of supernatural powers formed the psychological basis for more complex political de­ velopments. . . . The very same men who Bout the pretensions of a fellow-brave grovel before a darling of the gods, render him "implicit obedience and respect."15

Power Figures and Power Sources Primitives were frank about power, and in a spiritual cosmology power is relatively undisguised : it comes from the pool of ancestors and spirits. In our society power resides in technology, and we live and use the artifacts of technology so effortlessly and thought­ lessly that it almost seems we are not beholden to power-until, as said earlier, something goes wrong with an airplane, a generator, a telephone line. Then you see our "religious" anxiety come out.

The Origin of Inequality

45

Power is the life pulse that sustains man in every epoch, and unless the student understands power figures and power sources he can understand nothing vital about social history. The history of man's "fall" into stratified society can be traced around the figures of his heroes, to whom he is beholden for the power he wants most-to persevere as an organism, to continue experiencing. Again we pick up the thread from the very begin­ ning of our argument and see how intricately it is interwoven in man's career on this planet. If primitive man was not in bondage to the authority of living persons, he at least had some "heroes" somewhere, and these-as said-were the spirit powers, usually of the departed dead, the ancestors. The idea seems very strange to most of us today, but for the primitive it was often the dead who had the most power. In life the individual goes through ritualistic passages to states of higher power and greater importance as a helper of life. For many primitives death is the final promotion to the highest power of all, the passage into the invisible world of the spirits and the ability to use and manipulate the visible world from their new abode. • Many people-and Hocart was one of the foremost of these-have argued that primitives do not fear death as much as we do; but we know that this equanimity is due to the fact that the primitive was usually securely immersed in his par­ ticular cultural ideology, which was in essence an ideology of life, of how to continue on and to triumph over death. It is easy to see the significance of power for the human animal; it is really the basic category of his existence, as the organism's whole world is structured in terms of power. No wonder that Thomas Hobbes could say that man was characterized by "a general inclination, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death."16 One of the first things a child has to learn is how much power • This is not uni ver5 a l among primitives by any means. So me tribes fear the dead for only a little while immediately after death, and then t h ey are spirits who repre­ t ho u gh t to become weak. Some tribes fear especially those spirits died prematurely sent u n fi n is he d and unfulfilled life, spirits of persons whodied and would be envious of the living, and so on. Radin offers a fr an kly inter­ actionist point of view by saying that the dead are feared because they c a n ­ not be c on trolled as well as when they were alive. P. Ra d i n , The World of rimitive Man New York : Grove Press 1 960 ) , . 143.

46

ESCAPE FROM EVIL

he has and how much exists in others and in the world. Only if he learns this can he be sure of surviving; he has to learn very minutely what powers he can count on to facilitate his life and what powers he has to fear and avoid in order to protect it. So power becomes the basic category of being for which he has, so to speak, a natural respect : if you are wrong about power, you don't get a chance to be right about anything else; and the things that happen when the organism loses its powers are a decrease of vitality and death. Little wonder, then, that primitive man had right away to conceptualize and live according to hierarchies of power and give them his most intense respect. Anthropology discovered that the basic categories of primitive thought are the ideas of mana and taboo, which we can translate simply as "power" and "danger" or "watch out" ( because of power ) . The study of life, people, and the world, then, broke down into an alertness for distributions of power. The more mana you could find to tap, the more taboo you could avoid, the better. But power is an invisible mystery. It erupts out of nature in storms, volcanoes, meteors, in springtime and newborn babies; and it returns into nature in ashes, winter, and death. The only way we know it is there is to see it in action. And so the idea of mana, or special power erupting from the realm of the invisible and the supernatural, can only be spotted in the unusual, the surpassing, the excellent, that which transcends what is necessary or expected. From the very beginning, the child experiences the awesomeness of life and his problems of survival and well-being in other people; and so persons come to be the most intimate place where one looks to be delighted by the specialness of mysterious life, or where one fears to be overwhelmed by powers that he cannot understand or cope with. It is natural, then, that the most immediate place to look for the eruptions of special power is in the activities and qualities of persons; and so, as we saw, eminence in hunting, extra skill and strength, and special fearlessness in warfare right away marked those who were thought to have an extra charge of power or mana. They earned respect and special privileges and had to be handled gently because they were both an asset and a danger: in their very persons they were an open fount between two worlds, f.J.... ..-. ..,; ot';hl ro o n ..-1

f.l.n

i ro u; C' .; h l c.

., ., ;1

Y\ n U t tll r

n � c c ;::l

rl tln·nn crh t'hPm

!l
View more...

Comments

Copyright ©2017 KUPDF Inc.
SUPPORT KUPDF